Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/389

Rh agencies of the Government was not often called into requisition. When they did intercede their acts seem to have commended themselves in a high degree to the common sense of what was right.

Voluntary contributions were the sole reliance for the support of the Provisional Government during the first year of its existence. But the Legislature of 1844, composed mainly of new-comers with whom tax-paying was still a habit, had no faith in subscription-paper financiering. They did not let the omission of the power of taxation from among the enumerated powers in the organic law of 1843 deter them. A bill to levy a tax of one-eighth of one per cent of the value of about all kinds of property, except farms and the produce of the fields, was passed during the first week of their session, June 25, 1844. Two days later an act was passed providing for the appointment of a territorial assessor and arranging for his proceeding to make the assessment for the levy almost immediately. The assessor and the collector were necessarily territorial officers until the provision for the election of county assessors in the general revenue law of December, 1845.

But the right to exercise of the power of levying on private property for the support of a government was not to go unchallenged. At the time the committee of ways and means reported the first measure enacted for levying a tax there was a minority report recommending that no other than a poll tax of one dollar be laid upon every male inhabitant of the age of twenty-one and upward, except